Friday, October 10, 2008

Entire-paper plagiarism - NATURE

Nature 455, 715 (2008)

Thousands of 'similarities' found between papers.

When Eric Le Bourg, a French biogerontologist, came across a paper in a Korean journal recently, he almost fell off his chair; the entire article — text and graphs included — had been taken from one of his earlier articles. “It was plagiarism from beginning to end,” he says. “I was astonished; it was pure cut and paste.”

Such blatant copying of an entire article is not unknown, says Harold Garner, a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Garner’s team has used its eTBLAST textmatching software to build Deja Vu, a continually updated database that already holds some 75,000 abstracts listed in Medline that seem highly similar. His team has so far found dozens of near-100% clone papers.